Laurence Tribe

Washington Post’s theater critic Peter Marks loves the U.S. Constitution, particularly when it’s re-interpreted by Democrats as a “patriarchal” document, or used to float lefty principles. A new Putlitzer-nominated Broadway show has scratched that revisionist itch and Marks reacted blissfully, trying to capture that spirit of progressive interpretation by interviewing several prominent media lefties on how they see the Constitution.

Sunday's Washington Post pushed the new liberal sensation on Broadway: a play called What The Constitution Means to Me, written by Heidi Schreck. Here's your spoiler on the plot: the Constitution has never been great. In March, NPR's Fresh Air promoted Scheck under the headline "How Women Have Been 'Profoundly' Left Out Of The U.S. Constitution." Post drama critic Peter Marks marked the play's success by channeling the thrills Harvard professor Laurence Tribe got up his leg over the whole thing.

Appearing on CNN’s New Day on Tuesday to promote his new book on presidential impeachment, left-wing Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe warned Democrats against being too quick to call for President Trump’s impeachment. He argued that they should wait for “overwhelming” bipartisan consensus on the issue and proclaimed: “If you’re going to shoot him, you’ve got to shoot to kill.”

On Tuesday’s Anderson Cooper 360, CNN senior political commentator and former presidential adviser David Gergen warned that “we are in impeachment territory for the first time” in light of The New York Times report about the Jim Comey memo in which President Trump allegedly asked him to end the Mike Flynn investigation.

On Monday’s Good Morning America, co-host George Stephanopoulos was all set to convict President Trump of a crime and move on to impeachment proceedings as he cited left-wing Harvard Law professor and Barack Obama mentor Laurence Tribe, who called for just that in a screed for Saturday’s Washington Post.

In a Saturday op-ed in the Washington Post, Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe wrote that "The time has come for Congress to launch an impeachment investigation of President Trump for obstruction of justice." Tribe says it should happen now, because "To wait for the results of the multiple investigations underway is to risk tying our nation’s fate to the whims of an authoritarian leader." (Conviction first, trial later.) To make his case, Tribe distorted both past history and current reality, while the Post failed to disclose key matters about the professor's entanglement which readers deserve to know.

On Monday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, host O'Donnell and Frank Rich of New York magazine talked up the possibility that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz is not really a natural-born U.S. citizen and therefore not eligible to serve as President.

Rich, a former New York Times columnist, praised GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as "brilliant" for pushing the issue, and the two at one point laughed it up together when Rich cracked that a wall should have been built to keep the Cruz family from crossing from Canada into the U.S. Rich: "The problem could have been solved if we had built a wall on the Canadian border and Canada paid for it. Then, the Cruzes never would have entered and we wouldn't have this problem."

In recent years, some advocates of increased gun control have called for repeal or revision of the Second Amendment, but Adam Gopnik believes that either would be superfluous.

In a Friday article, Gopnik asserted that “the only amendment necessary for gun legislation…is the Second Amendment itself, properly understood, as it was for two hundred years in its plain original sense. This sense can be summed up in a sentence: if the Founders hadn’t wanted guns to be regulated, and thoroughly, they would not have put the phrase ‘well regulated’ in the amendment.”

Liberal constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe may be one of the men who inspired President Obama politically, but he strongly disagrees with his power grab regarding EPA regulation now, and so all bets are off as far as the Daily Beast's Eleanor Clift is concerned.

CNN anchor Piers Morgan devoted a considerable portion of his Friday program to pushing for more gun control, breaking with those who have advised delaying such talk until after a period of mourning for shooting victims in Aurora, Colorado.

Morgan not only began Piers Morgan Tonight with a "Piers' Special Commentary" calling for more gun laws, but, later in the program, he included three guests who argued in favor of more gun control, with only one to argue against, with whom the CNN host ended up becoming agitated as Denver University Professor David Kopel scolded Morgan for not waiting longer before launching into a divisive political debate.

Shortly after beginning the show, Morgan played a clip of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg advising the presidential candidates to talk about the gun control issue, and then began his commentary:

Update: According to the Library of Congress website, July 28, 1868 was the day when Secretary of State William Seward "issued a proclamation certifying without reservation that the Fourteenth Amendment was a part of the United States Constitution." Todd told his viewers that July 28, 1868 was the day the amendment "officially became part of the U.S. Constitution" although Article V of the U.S. Constitution states that amendments "shall be valid to all intents and purposes...when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths" of the states, which in the case of the Fourteenth Amendment would be July 9, 1868.

Wanted: Better fact checkers for MSNBC.

For today's "Flashback" feature on the "Daily Rundown," anchor Chuck Todd misinformed viewers by noting that on July 28, 1868, the 14th Amendment went into effect.

Gosh, isn't it convenient that Associated Press reporter Jim Abrams, in a Wednesday evening dispatch ("Democrats say Obama should invoke 14th Amendment"), was able to find "some legal scholars" who believe that President Obama can invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to ignore the nation's current debt ceiling and have the government go out and borrow more money, but "somehow" didn't name any? Not only that, he didn't even tell readers why 14th Amendment power creationists might be wrong, let alone find "some other" dissenting legal scholar to explain why. Instead, he instead went to White House spokesman Jay Carney, who only said that the president doesn't have such authority.

I suspect that Abrams' "oversight" occurred because the only "legal scholars" he could have cited would have been uncomfortable Democrats in Congress who don't want to be on record voting against any and every effort to control spending which might be attached to whatever bill or bills House Republicans might attempt to pass -- a matter of fierce internal GOP debate as of late Thursday evening.

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